Meditations on the Commandments: Commandment #49 - Thou Shall Not Rebel
Meditations on the Commandments
Commandment #49 - Thou Shall Not Rebel
The 77 commandments are the greatest gift from the Divine World. They are our moral and social guidelines, that when applied, bring us closer to our goal of being like the Neteru (Gods). These commandments, the pillars of the Kem civilization, are what allowed the culture to reach such great heights. Due to the sacrifices of Prophet Naba, humanity’s displaced descendants now have the fortune of being reconnected with our Ancestral Culture. By adopting the values and wisdom of Kem Culture, we can begin to reshape our perspective and understanding, and free ourselves from the subjective delusions of the coloniser.
Thou shall not rebel. What is it to rebel? To rebel means to resist any or some authority, control, or tradition; to refuse allegiance to, or to show or feel utter repugnance. As a necessity, we must first set the proper context from which to explore this commandment. In present times, our corrupt politicians are paraded around as the supposed power or authority. But, in reality, the Divine governs all aspects of existence; they are the authority. Because of this, the paradigm from which I should contextualise this commandment, in order to build my understanding, must be one that honors the Divine World- traditional Kemetic culture.
Our Ancestors had the fortune of being exposed to and influenced by the Divine World. They set the goal for humanity- to be like the Neteru (Gods) or to replicate the World of the Gods, after seeing the perfection of the Divine World. So, accordingly, the Kemetic culture has Divine legitimacy. The traditional structures (kingships, family, societal, etc.) all align with Divine principles and are not subject to human preferences, but objective, based on humanity’s goal. The logic of returning to the culture of my Ancestors is clear, but due to my colonial conditioning, the task of fully embracing it is not without its challenges. Rebuilding my life in accordance with Kem culture means letting go of my attachments to individualism, comfort, my opinions, fight for control, and other colonial values, and adopting a life and mentality much more rigid, and in some cases unappealing. Though this presents a challenge to my emotions, my refusal to reclaim my traditions (or parts of them) is a display of breaking the 49th commandment.
I, unlike Wsr and Set, was not given a choice on how to live out immortality, or even mortality for that matter. I am a mortal being whose decision was made due to the choices of those Neteru. My destiny as Herut obliges me to fight to reclaim my father’s kingdom that was stolen by his brother Set. With this mission, I must protect what is good or pure. Anything outside of this is an act of rebelling against my destiny. This context takes the commandment away from seeing rebellion as something drastic that requires gun, knife, or sword, and instead emphasises the day to day actions and thoughts that exemplify either following or breaking it.
One example of breaking this commandment is choosing not to fulfill my responsibilities as a woman. I understand that women are the backbone of the society, providing the stability for our families. That stability becomes jeopardised if on any given day, based on how I feel, I rebel against my responsibilities. This rebellion comes by way of neglecting tasks such as cleaning, organizing, serving, caring for all of the children, not just my own, etc. I also cannot ignore the ramifications of the negative energy I sometimes carry about doing these things. Too often, I’m content with these tasks not being the priority of my day. Many times I’ll have to be asked or prompted to give attention to some of these areas. If left up to me, who knows when it would get done? This is certainly not the model that our Ancestral Mother, Aishat, provided for us to follow. This is not the model that I want my daughter to follow either, but it is what I am showing her.
One’s perspective is a huge determinant in how one responds to their challenges or even in how one brings unnecessary challenges upon themselves. With this in mind, I’ve been focusing on the positivity of my role and responsibilities as a woman. If I have a particular complaint about something, which is often based off of laziness, irritation because I’m not able to have the comfort I’d like at that moment, or comparisons I’m making between men and women’s work, I stop and correct my perspective. Rather than submitting to my emotional tendency of deeming my work a burden, I’m fighting to apply the logic that fits, and see it as an honour, or simply the reality of what’s required of me, and an opportunity to build my qualities.
Another example that demonstrates breaking this commandment is my battle with embracing polygamy, a major Kemetic cultural monument. I understand it is not for me to decide whether I agree or disagree with polygamy. If I’m following the path back to my traditions, it’s simply an aspect of the Divinely legitimate culture that I must accept. Based on my own experiences growing up, and conditioning, having been raised in Maanu (America), it is not surprising that this monument elicits certain emotions. However, that cannot be my excuse not to rectify those emotions. My energetic expression is being transmitted, so even my sentiments against embracing polygamy are acts of rebellion. Many modern sects such as Hebrew Israelite, Islam, Mormonism, etc. have adopted the practice of polygamy. This is what led to my initial exposure to the tradition. The pseudo-polygamous examples I grew up witnessing left a distasteful impression on me. However, the Kemetic culture provides a logic for why it is practiced, and even favourable, logic that I was missing in the partial examples I’ve known. I recognise now, that I can’t taste a peach and then say I don’t like apples. A peach just isn’t an apple. Similarly, I can’t stand on the examples I’ve grown up with as the reason I oppose polygamy. They weren’t traditional polygamy. The more I am exposed to polygamy from the traditional standpoint, the more I’m beginning to understand its value and the less emotional I’m becoming about it. As I continue to push down my emotions and meditate on it, the need for opposition diminishes and the closer I am coming to not breaking the commandment in this way.
Anything that’s not rooted in Divine principles must then be based on human preference or ambition. This is rebellion and is especially dangerous considering that many believe they are entitled to those ambitions and opinions, no matter how destructive they may be. Focusing on the logic of a culture tens of thousands of years old, rather than the opinions and emotional reactions of me, a 29 year old, is a good place to start in order to continue to let go of the values that are working against my uphill climb.
Kemeera Nimahat
M’TAM 32nd generation
Chicago, IL USA
Before entering Imentet (World of the Dead), Prophet Neb Naba warned his initiates about the importance of the forty-ninth commandment. The Gods have created this world and the fragile harmony that maintains its transformations. A perfect existence created by perfect beings. In order for humans to fit the Divine Order, the Gods have given us rules. We have also been endowed with “free” will. Many other species (plants, animals, minerals) seem to work towards this Divine Order effortlessly but our will and emotions serve as a huge channel of corruption. Our ambitions and what motivates or excites us, tend to lead us outside of its strict order.
The spiritual path is a lifelong, arduous journey. We must learn this Divine Order and work hard at our own evolution within it. Our species has been doing this since the beginning of our enlightenment. This is evident with the spiritual monuments (pyramids, sphinx, obelisks, etc.) and technologies (oracles, sky maps, etc.) found all around the planet. Our adherence to and harmonious positions within the greater order of things improves as our understanding of our own identity grows, and we learn to uphold our responsibilities better. As we do, we evolve more efficiently and demand less effort and tolerance from our environment. The spiritual path that leads towards perfecting ourselves is the foundation of Kemetic society. Kemet’s governing body led by the Pharaoh was established to ensure that every individual had the chance to face his/her self on this path and achieve one’s respective destiny.
Since humans rebelled against Kemetic society, we have lost an understanding of our origins and the ability to properly orient ourselves within human history. Now the ambitious among us impose their own ideas, dreams and desires upon the masses. As a method of self-protection, we all have the ability to investigate the history of any individual claim in order to verify its validity. So as political powers grow, the manipulation of history (in more ways than one) is often their first objective.
Our current political system has devalued the importance of history and reputation and instead asked us to take it seriously for what it can do in the moment. Now our political leaders, even with no leadership experience, spend time campaigning where they convince us of their validity. Today’s political systems and market societies have left today’s colonial populations calling for a certain level of convincing before our attention, respect or adherence is given. It is a major component of a consumer mentality. If one is selling us something, until they can demonstrate to us why we need it, we will keep our money (energy) in our pockets and our cynicism high.
In the realm of spiritual education (natural reality) things are entirely different. Spiritual evolution is the obligation of each one of us. Our success cannot depend on another’s ability to sell its importance to us. How could it? Our spiritual survival depends on our level of discipline and conformity to the Divine Order. Any teacher, as good as they are, will have a primary obligation to their own spiritual development, so their job is definitely not to sell us any reason why we should live up to our spiritual potential.
In my own life I see how much I valued my “right” to rebel against things that I did not believe in. I wasted the majority of my young age putting my efforts “against” something rather than into building the things I wanted to see. I can now see that throughout its history, the society I was born into has always been an anti-culture and I unsuspectingly adopted its values. Colonial culture has never had an identity of its own, past the effort it has invested in devaluing other pre-existing cultures, namely humanity’s source culture: Kemet (Africa). Before considering that the laws and customs that existed in Kemet were the logical conclusion men and women reached after investigating and studying their reality, this system has built its identity from the perspective that it is different than what existed. This same behavior is seen in the minds of its educated members.
Its members end up valuing competition above all else. We cling to our individuality and our right to do what we want. We value only what makes sense to us or appeals to our emotions and if it is unable to, it is not worth our time. This is self-destruction. We have been cut off from an understanding that we are only a small portion of a much greater and more important whole. If we do not listen and adhere to what is needed of us in the dialogue that sustains the whole, and instead only focus on what makes sense to our limited perceptions in our own fragmented portion of it, we will cut ourselves off from our collective life force and slowly destroy ourselves. This is one way rebellion ends up in destruction.
The energy wasted in rebelling against things we don’t believe in is only lost -- hijacked by the destructive forces we ourselves must survive. It is wiser for us to use the valuable life force we have been given in order to build ourselves into what we do believe in.
If we are rebelling against what is needed of us as components of this planet we will be discarded. If what we believe in rebels against our parents’ or Ancestors’ wishes, we will create family issues in our lives, and may become cursed by those who gave us life -- never finding true success or fulfillment in what we do. If what we believe in rebels against the World of the Gods and the rules that they have put on their creation, we will set ourselves up for eternal decomposition, our own eternal death.
It is our responsibility to learn what is needed of us on all levels of what we are a part of. It is our job to behave according to what we can perceive those guidelines to be and improve upon them as we improve our understandings. Our rebellion is an expression of our ignorance. We are conditioned to cling to the illusion of free choice. In actuality our personal desires are worthless in front of our greater identity. An individual alone is the weakest thing in the universe. We are only one cataract in a river of blood that is the “I”. We are only one channel of many expressions on this planet that we can consider when we reflect on the “I”. We are only one density in the existential soup of the world that is the “I”. It is our job to gain a bigger more encompassing perspective. If we rebel against what we see to be outside of ourselves, we inevitably end up rebelling against ourselves, our own survival and our own evolution.
Nehez Meniooh
M’TAM 2nd generation
Chicago, IL USA
In the colonial environment, we are taught that rebellion is a necessary and practical road to our own freedom, that it is a way to free ourselves from bonds that are unfairly cast on us. That rebellion is like an uprising against an oppressor. This is a very external perspective on rebellion, one that clearly serves the leaders of this system, a system that was built by rebellion.
If we hold this perspective in our minds then the victim mentality can take over, and we can justify the application of rebellion. It can be very useful to us any time we feel overwhelmed by a task before us, bullied by the conditions of our own lives, or when someone or something exposes us in a light that makes us feel smaller, put down, and humiliated. We reason to ourselves that we might rebel because of an external force. However, we know that the commandments come to govern our internal lives, not our external condition, and so we must try to apply it in this way.
The root of the English word rebel comes from the Greek root words “re-” meaning to do again, and “bellum” meaning war. The meaning comes to illustrate warring again, or reinitiating a battle that has been fought before.
So we know, from this definition, that rebellion is not something that we just do once, but something that is done again and again. As we see in countless example throughout human history, it is something that we think will improve our position as people, but does it? Or is it the repetition of something we know is not right, that we know is a lazy form of improvement. We know that in order to truly improve our situation we must build from the inside. We must build our quality, not just overthrow the one who we think is oppressing us.
The act of rebelling can be seen as a form of animalistic memory. Animalistic memory is when we do something that was already revealed to be wrong, but instead of changing our actions, we end up justifying a need to do it again. Rebellion is something that is acted upon from a purely internal place, a habit of doing something over and over again that we know we should not, rather than an act against something as one might often think. Rebelling against something adds a form of justification to it, and this justification could even be used as some of the reasoning in the animalistic memory process, but the action is still justified from the inside. Rebelling is something that we do against our self, against our own growth, against what we have already learned.
The Greek culture comes to show us a social climate where the idea of warring with Gods was acceptable. One way that humans tried to show power or strength was to try to pull Gods who were supposed to represent some kind of divine qualities down to their level, the human level, where they could be defeated in competitions of human behavior.
The illogical nature of this is apparent. As students of M’TAM, we know that the concept of warring with Gods is blasphemous. Although the Gods presented by Greece were only as legitimate as other human creations, this concept alone is one that, as Kem, we would be careful to avoid. It could be surmised that, even in Greece, at early stages there were those who were aware (from their exposure to spirituality in Kemet) that the concept of bringing a God down to the level of a human was, in all ways, wrong. They had an agenda however to push their nation state forward and this was reason enough (or justification) to commit this blasphemy again and again. Maybe as time progressed there were other reasons such as the fortune and fame to be won as a gladiator, etc. but whatever the case may be, it begins to look like animalistic memory.
This pushes the concept of the forty-ninth commandment to another level. To commit a crime of animalistic memory: to do something over and over that you know is wrong, always for a different reason, takes on a different meaning in the relationship a human has to him/her self and history. For instance, the concept that we know in the modern world of rebellion presents something that is seen as almost honorable. In the case of Greece, they had their own reasoning, faulty or otherwise, for entering into a power game against Gods.
Some might justify to themselves that even the conditions of our lives are something we should rebel against, but we forget that it is we who entered into an agreement with the Neteru on the Nineteenth of Tehuti. It is us who asked to be judged and even asked for the conditions (77 Commandments) that would help us come closer to the World of the Neteru.
Rebellion is the tool of the ego, but not the egoist (one who takes the spiritual progression of the self as their first priority). The true egoist will look for these situations of challenge and humiliation to build up himself/herself into a more quality human being.
Imaya Khefira Hasati
M’TAM 3rd Generation
Chicago, IL USA